An Interview with Al-Bayyati

Al-Ahram Weekly, Feb 1999

"One of the last remaining pioneers of modern Arabic poetry, Al-Bayyati
does not readily oblige. Surrounded by friends and proteges, he flits through
the lobby of the Sheraton, dodging journalists. "Is it twelve already?"
he says when I finally manage to corner him. "I'll be back in a minute."
My three-day quest will not be concluded until he makes another phone call. But
the effort pays off. Al-Bayyati's conversation turns out to be like his poetry.
In a few words he can conjure up a whole world -- diverse, meaningful,
engrossing. "I'm not normally late for appointments but it is very
difficult nowadays. Sometimes when I wake up," he confides, "I'm so
dizzy I can hardly see."

Reluctant to talk about his early life, he decides to have a coffee before
we start. "Writing is a difficult art," he says. "It not only
requires talent, but also thought and linguistic ability. Without these the
human being could never become a writer. At the beginning, in the early stages
of youth, the writer -- or the person who wants to become a writer -- must
perfect his instruments. Perfecting one's instruments is accomplished through
reading the literary heritage and following the school curricula. We sometimes
underrate the latter, but they are essential to the initial formative stages. If
people possess various feelings and sensations, even commendable ones, but have
not mastered the art of writing, they cannot write a text or an article. When
one writes one is not fooling around or simply inventing things. Rather one is
capturing things. Capturing the atoms that make up the universe. Capturing and
crystallising thoughts, moulding them into literary form. Writing is also a
mental exercise, which starts with a very simple thing, and gradually, day after
day, turns into something complex."

The same could be said of Al-Bayyati's life. He started off as a simple
enough schoolteacher, and had his first collection of poems, Mala'ika wa
Shayatin (Angels and Devils), published in 1950, the year of his graduation from
Dar Al-Mu'allimin (the Teachers' College) in Baghdad. By 1954, though, he was an
editor in one of the most widely circulated cultural magazines, Al-Thaqafa
Al-Jadida (The New Culture) and, due to his involvement in radical communist
politics, had aroused enough suspicion to be fired from his job. He set off on a
long journey, that took him first to Damascus (where he now resides after four
decades of wandering), Beirut, Cairo and many Western capitals. "I've
always searched for the sun's springs," he explains in unmistakable Bayyati
fashion. "When a human being stays in one place, he's likely to die.
People too stagnate like water and air. Therefore the death of nature, of words,
of the spirit has prompted me to keep travelling, so as to encounter new suns,
new springs, new horizons. A whole new world being born."

Travelling, as such, must have implied much more than political survival.
Even when he could return to his country following the Iraqi Revolution and
declaration of the Republic in 1958, Al-Bayyati often chose to stay abroad. He
travelled far and wide, and his encounter with Spanish culture, as a cultural
attach» in the 1980s, to which he paid tribute in several poems, was a
particularly enriching experience "I don't travel for the sake of tourism
and entertainment. Nor to settle down. It is rather a cure for the soul, it is
the spiritual nourishment that allows me to go on writing in a genuinely
creative way. Of course," Al-Bayyati rebounds, "my relations with
Iraqi governments were never conciliatory. I belong to the Iraqi people. I
cannot separate myself from the people." And it is the Titan's faithfulness
to the people, whom he aided against the tyranny of Zeus, that endears
Prometheus to Al-Bayyati's heart. Had he adopted a pseudonym from Greek
mythology like the Syrian poet Ali Ahmed Said ("Adonis"), Al-Bayyati
undoubtedly would have called himself Prometheus: The Fire-Thief came with the
seasons/Carrying the will of the ages -- the rivers... "Over the years
there were dire disappointments. False dawns. But this is not res tricted to the
modern age, it has gone on since the days of Sumer and Babylonia.

The Iraqi people were subject to attacks both from outside and within. They
paid a flagrant price, the price of deceit and betrayal, tyranny and
dictatorship. And the tyrants were just as cruel, just as criminal, as the
invaders. Even more so. At least the invaders, after they destroy and rob and
violate, tend to go away and leave the people alone. But the tyrants stay on."
Unlike most Arab intellectuals of his generation, Al-Bayyati was not born in
the countryside, but in the heart of Baghdad in 1926, a fact that may explain
the metropolitan sense of history that has characterised his writing.
Throughout his life he would continue to live in cities, remaining close to the
centre of political upheavals. His rites of passage, however, seem to have been
quiet events, giving no indication of his present influence and fame. "Very
early on," he recalls, "circumstances made it possible for me to read
classic books, thanks to the library of my grandfather, who was an imam and a
religious man. I was tormented by the fact that I couldn't fathom the meaning of
some of the texts we read. Once, I remember, he was reading from Al-Futuhat
Al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Conquests) by Ibn Arabi, and Ibn Arabi's language at
that time was incomprehensible to me. So I resorted to listening to my
grandfather's voice [and how its tone changed] while he recited the sentences
and phrases, and managed to understand. As the words turned into movements and
signals, I continued trying to make out what they meant. And I would ask my
grandfather, 'Is this what it means?' He would say, 'How did you know?' And I
would tell him, 'From the movement of your lips.' Later, one summer day in the
afternoon when I was still a secondary student, I experienced a strange feeling
and wrote a poem of 14 lines in the classic style. Three days later, my Arabic
teacher borrow ed my textbook so he could read to the class, and by coincidence
found the poem folded inside it. He came up to me and asked who had written the
poem, and when I told him it was I, he said, 'Is that possible? Leave it with me
and tomorrow I will give you my opinion.' The next day he had discovered two
mistakes, not grammatical, but in the rhyming scheme. Nonetheless he praised the
poem a great deal and even asked the class to give me a round of applause,
calling me 'The Poet' from then on. I felt very embarrassed and hid my face in
the book. The word seemed too great for me at the time. It placed a burden on my
shoulder. I began to feel responsible and didn't write anything for a year,
during which I read and read."

Al-Bayyati pauses to greet the Palestinian poet Samih Al-Qasim, who takes
his seat near by. "I read the turath (the classic literary canon) twice,"
he continues, "once at the beginning of life, when I rejected much and
accepted little, and once in middle age, when I accepted much and rejected
little. And when I read it for the third time in the last few years, I
discovered new springs of which I had taken no notice. I started hovering around
them. As I benefited from the turath and its texts, I discovered a new vision.
Some restless characters in our literary history had only been dealt with in a
perfunctory way, or were classed as ordinary, when in fact this restlessness of
theirs constituted a very special quality of mind. Abu Nuwwas or Abu Tammam, for
example. I was always seeking out this restlessness, which was present in their
poetry in a very subtle way and to which historians of literature paid no
attention. But when it comes to writing, what concerns me first and foremost is
life, human experience.

This is why I focus on my own experience, benefiting from all that I come
across, be they people or countries, books or lives, all of which resemble atoms
that combine to form a vision. As for Marxism," he responds, "I read
it as a philosophy, without subscribing to it directly as an ideology or
political system, without ever joining a party.

Of course, I am a leftist, a rebel since the start of my life. But I've
protected the core of my vision. A human vision is not a transient thing, it is
not the rise of a political order and the decline of another. And since my
rebellion is related to the rebellion of all ages, and to culture as the root
and the essence, my poetry was not affected by what was going on around me,
despite many a temptation, especially during the rise of the international left
when I lived in Moscow." Marxism has certainly not prevented him from
investigating the spiritual side of existence, and even affirming Sufi feelings:
Who gave you the right to seek out God in the City of Love... "I remained
independent. I must admit that in the 1950s and early 1960s, during the rise of
the left, my poetry was somewhat affected by politics, but only indirectly.
Because I experience life and live among people, and I have to think about whom
I address. For example, I do not write for people who pray in a mosque. I write
for people who live and die in society, and I have to offer them my vision..."
As for the Book Fair, Al-Bayyati is glad to be there. "It is an Arab
gathering whose most important virtue is bringing people together, readers and
writers and friends," he says. His latest published poem, Nussous Sharqiya
(Oriental Texts), which appeared in Akhbar Al-Adab this week, is an additional
source of pride. "It came of itself, this experiment, in which you will
find classical poetry, modern poetry and prose side by side. It's all in the
same language, as you will notice when you've read it. I mean, one doesn't feel
any sense of discontinuity because parts of it are metrical while others are
not. I write freely. I do not restrict myself to any one style. For example I
have a book which will be published soon in Damascus called Yanabi' Al-Shams
(Springs of the Sun), which is in verse. But at the same time there is another
one, Tahawulat Aisha (Aisha's Transformations), which is written entirely in
prose, but when you read it you feel that it is poetry..."

By now I am much obliged, and Al-Bayyati wants to make yet another phone
call. "I can go back to Damascus with a clear conscience," he says, "now
that I've given you this interview." One question, however, remains to be
answered, and a very important one at that. What do women mean to Al-Bayyati?
And why do they have such a strong presence in his poems? "In a recent poem
that I dedicated to Hafez Al-Shirazi," he tells me, "which was also
published in Akhbar Al-Adab, you'll notice that woman is very predominant, the
main theme of the poem, but she is not simply a woman. She is a creature of
light, a mythical, realistic, idealistic, materialistic, historical,
a-historical creature. Some art critics believe that colour is the most
essential aspect of paintings. A painting, they say, is colour. I say that the
poem is a woman."

Top Iraqi poet al-Bayati dies in Syria August 3, 1999

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Abdel Wahab al-Bayati, the renowned Iraqi poet who
spent half his life in exile, died Tuesday of a heart attack in Damascus. He
was 73.

The official Syrian Arab News Agency, which reported his death, gave no
further details, but friends said he was taken to hospital to be treated for
asthma.

Al-Bayati had lived in Damascus since 1996 after he left Jordan, where he
sought refuge after quitting his diplomatic post in Madrid, Spain, in protest
following Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

In 1995, Saddam Hussein's government stripped him of his citizenship after
he visited Saudi Arabia to participate in a cultural festival.

Ali Oqala Orsan, head of the Syria-based Arab Writers Federation, described
al-Bayati as "a pioneer of Arab modern poetry."

"His body has gone but his soul will remain among us and his innovation
will continue to shine in our lives," Oqlan told The Associated Press by
telephone from Damascus.

Al-Bayati was one of the first Arab poets who broke away from classical
forms of poetry and started what later became known as free verse.

His first collection "Angels and Devils," which was published in
Beirut in 1950, and later the "Broken Jugs" were considered the real
launch of Arab poetry's modernist movement.

After his graduation from Baghdad University in 1950, al-Bayati became a
teacher but was soon dismissed for his leftist political opinions.

In 1954, he went into exile, first to Syria and then to the Soviet Union and
Egypt. He returned to Iraq after the 1958 anti- monarchy coup, but later left
following disagreements with the government.

He returned again after the 1968 coup but fled a few years later when the
regime began a brutal campaign against leftists. In 1980, Saddam assigned him
to Iraq's diplomatic mission in Madrid in an attempt to win him over to his
side.

Despite his anti-government stand, al-Bayati was never criticized in Iraq's
tightly-controlled official media and his books are sold in Baghdad book shops.

Al-Bayati was born in a Baghdad neighborhood near the shrine of the 12th
century Sufi Abdel Qadir al-Jilani. Most of his poetry was later influenced by
Sufism.

In an interview with The Associated Press in 1997, al-Bayati described his
exile as a "tormenting experience" which affected his poetry and
writings.

"I always dream at night that I am in Iraq and hear its heart beating
and smell its fragrance carried by the wind, especially after midnight when it's
quiet."

He spent his last days with fellow Iraqi exiles in Damascus cafes,
reminiscing the days of peace and Iraq's leading role in Arabic poetry and
modern art, according to his family members.

Syrian officials said an official funeral will be held for al-Byati in
Damascus on Wednesday. They said his family has yet to to decide whether he will
buried in Syria or taken to Iraq.